From Marketing Strategy

Is your brand getting great marketing results from Pinterest?
Check out these handy Pinterest marketing resources to do even better.

Pinterest is a fantastic marketing tool that is under-utilized by countless brands. By now, it’s likely that you at least have a brand account setup on Pinterest for your business, but maybe it’s just sitting there, just a handful of pins on a board or two, quietly waiting for something to happen. But what if you spent just a little more time on Pinterest?

Would you be surprised if I told you that Pinterest can be a huge driver of highly-engaged traffic to your website? Would you be happy to achieve an SEO boost? Would you like to see conversion rates on your site go up?

Pinterest can deliver all those things and more. As a visually-oriented social network, highly focused on lifestyle categories, Pinterest can also have a huge impact on your brand position. There are a lot of reasons to kick up your Pinterest activity, and fortunately, there are also a ton of great Pinterest marketing resources out there you can use to crank up your Pinterest performance in almost no time. Here are some of the best articles and resources I’ve found recently that you can use to leverage this powerful marketing opportunity:

It’s always helpful to understand the current state of a social network if you’re going to get the most out of your time there. This handy list of important stats compiled by the folks at Business 2 Community highlights some of the most current and interesting facts about Pinterest. Check out this article.

Social Media Examiner is a wealth of information, and this podcast definitely delivers some extremely valuable tips. Pinterest is a massive driver of website traffic, and this podcast/article covers a selection of great tips on how to structure your pins for maximum engagement. Check out this article.

If your website doesn’t have a functional and effective social media sharing tool on it, check out AddThis. They have several valuable articles in their knowledge base, such as this one that features a bunch of tips for setting up your Pinterest profile, setting up ‘rich pins’, and properly integrating ‘Pin It’ buttons throughout your website. Check out this article.

Not only does Pinterest drive a ton of traffic, but that traffic is extremely engaged and much more likely to convert on ecommerce sites. Shopify has crafted a beautiful and informative infographic detailing some significant points for marketers managing ecommerce sites. Check out this article.

Just because you may not be selling a physical product or marketing a lifestyle brand doesn’t mean you can’t capitalize on Pinterest. Bloggers can, too. Elna Cain produced this great article at Blogging Wizard highlighting some great tips for generating traffic to your blog using Pinterest. Check out this article.

So don’t wait. Pinterest is ready and waiting to start pouring traffic in to your website. Just be sure to follow solid tips like these and you’ll be reaping the benefits soon enough. If you’re already seeing gains from using Pinterest for your brand, why not jump in to the comments here and let me know your best Pinterest tips. I’d love to hear them!

You may have all the technology and expertise in the world at your disposal, but do you have this crucial element to SEO, content and social media success?

Do you have a fantastic SEO platform? A beautiful piece of software, with all the data dots connected, and all the keyword bells and social media whistles that you could ever ask for? If your brand has a culture that is forward-thinking enough to recognize how crucial a tool like this is to the success of your digital marketing, then I hope the answer is yes.

But that’s not the only thing that demands your precious marketing dollars. Are you promoting your posts to precision-targeted audiences on Facebook? Gaining a following on Twitter by advertising your best stuff to key influencers? Utilizing all the many paid search tools to drive traffic to your brilliant content?

All these magnificent things are not cheap, but they are certainly worth it . . . IF you’ve also made another important little investment. An investment in great people.

Don’t underestimate what it takes to win in SEO, Social, & Content Marketing

It’s no secret that the biggest bottleneck in content marketing (and by extension, SEO and social) is TIME. It takes a huge amount of time to develop truly great content that delivers value, ranks in search, and resonates throughout social media. This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that brands hit when developing their content marketing strategies and social plans. Most brands just don’t have enough people to actually execute what is needed to outpace competition and gain more ground in their markets.

I mean, on their own each thing you do for digital content doesn’t seem very daunting, and this is part of the perception that makes content ‘seem’ easier than it actually is. Seriously, how long does it take to write a 500 word blog post? But what about 4 or 5 of them? Maybe add a whitepaper in there, too? Throw together a handful of tweets every day? A few Facebook posts? Couple of things for LinkedIn? Pic for Instagram? And let’s not forget the time needed to crush it on YouTube. It adds up fast.

But that’s just reality, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t just ‘buy’ time, can you?

Yeah, actually, you can buy time.

What if I told you for the low, low price of a single person’s salary, you could flat-out BUY dozens more hours every week? Because that’s exactly what you’re doing when you hire people. Every person you bring on is paying your brand back with their time. All of it. Every day.

Hiring great people gives you their time, their expertise, and their knowledge to execute your strategies and tactics. Without great people to action those ideas and plans, they’re nothing more than decorations on Powerpoint slides.

1+1 = 2, mostly. Sometimes it’s 3. Possibly 4?

This is really basic math. When you go from one content writer to two, that’s instantly doubling the amount of content you can churn out. That’s two times the amount of original, fresh, relevant and valuable content for your brand to rank in search and share in social.

Yeah, it’s that simple, and it scales in huge ways. Once those two writers begin to develop synergies, sharing valuable research, conducting brainstorming sessions, etc, you’ll find that your content team becomes more than just the sum of its parts. They now have the support they need to do more than they could on their own.

Investing in people pays the biggest dividends of any dollar you spend in SEO, social, and content. People give you the ability to action what you’ve been told by all the data that you have in your analytics tools and platforms, and put in motion all the advice coming from your agencies and consultants. Great people and their time are the best things you can buy for your brand.

In this episode, Jonathan Barrick and Josh Muirhead discuss how Pinterest and its search mechanics combine with other key aspects of the platform to bring power to digital marketers, and a recent article about how marketing agencies should be taking a good hard look at software as a competitive differentiator.

In this episode, Jonathan Barrick and Josh Muirhead discuss ways to be more strategic when planning your content calendar, and how important it is to be adaptable in the current digital marketing career economy.

In this episode, Jonathan Barrick and Josh Muirhead discuss three recent trends in digital marketing careers and an initiative by Google to more effectively measure the effects of online engagement (specifically SEM) on retail store visits.

In this episode, Jonathan Barrick and Josh Muirhead discuss how marketers can get better understanding of their SEM efforts by mapping actions and events in their reporting and finding true correlation and causation, and explore why some brands have made the puzzling decision to ‘go dark’ on social media and shift to an advertising-only model.

In this episode, Jonathan Barrick and Josh Muirhead discuss some of the latest news in social cause marketing, including Dove’s latest and greatest campaign, along with the dangers of not being prepared for what comes with social cause marketing. Also, we take a look at what it means to have an ‘optimized’ personal digital brand, and how you can start optimizing your own digital presence.

A handy cheat sheet for evaluating your optimized web pages.

Back in the early days of Search Engine Optimization, there were not nearly as many factors influencing the visibility and authority of an average optimized web page. It used to be a simple matter of SEO basics, like choosing your keywords carefully, writing some solid copy, taking care of your headers, alt tags and meta tags, and BOOM you were pretty much done!

Well these days things are a bit more complex. There are more factors influencing a page’s SEO rank now than ever before, and it can be a daunting task for website managers, content creators, and SEO coordinators to keep track of them all. Fortunately, the team over at SurePayroll in partnership with Ghergich & Co. have created this nice, tidy infographic on the Anatomy of an Optimized Web Page to help keep things clear:

In this episode Josh Muirhead and Jonathan Barrick discuss brands evolving in to full-fledged media companies, putting customer experiences and user-generated content at the forefront. Additionally, Jon and Josh discuss the news of Google’s latest algorithm change, taking aim at doorway pages, and what it means for your SEO strategy.